Parchayi.com – Personal Finance Simplified

Nokia, a company that spends more on R&D than most of it’s peers has decided to abandon Meego, it’s next generation smartphone Operating System and semi-abandon Symbian, the heart and soul of most of it’s current phones.

Official Statement about Meego:

Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.

Official Statement about Symbian:

With Nokia’s planned move to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, Symbian becomes a franchise platform, leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value. This strategy recognizes the opportunity to retain and transition the installed base of 200 million Symbian owners. Nokia expects to sell approximately 150 million more Symbian devices in the years to come.

Huh? What does that even mean? How does Nokia expect somebody to buy a Symbian device with that nonsense about “leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value“.

And for Meego, that sounds like the death knell. I wonder why they are even bothering to produce that oft delayed Meego phone anymore. Are they taking insiration from the Kin?

This is fantastic news for Microsoft though. With Apple and Android quickly taking over the smartphone market, Windows Phone 7′s future was sort of uncertain even though the product itself showed promise. With Nokia’s might behind it, WP7 is here to stay.

I’m glad that somebody bought PALM finally! I own no stock in either PALM, Inc. (PALM) or Hewlett Packard Company (HPQ) but I didn’t want to see WebOS die. I don’t own a WebOS phone but it was a strong contender to be my next phone. Of course my hope was that HTC would take the EVO or the Incredible and slap PalmOS on it, but well HP can do something similar.

Dell is entering the Smartphone market, Asus makes the Garmin Phone and Lenovo has a phone in China. It was an obvious next step for HP to have a phone and HP is a Microsoft Windows Phone 7  partner too. But if HP could have its own OS that is at least equal to if not better than everything that is out there along with PALM’s excellent patent portfolio, that is even better than having the Microsoft deal.

Microsoft has been going after Android device makers to license patents and HP can avoid those Microsoft fees if it has PALM. In fact HP can avoid Windows Phone 7 altogether. Personally even though I am very happy with my current Windows Mobile phone and Windows Phone 7 sounds promising, I expect that it will have teething trouble because it is a complete rewrite and not backwards compatible. Also Windows Phone 7 suffers from many shortcomings of the iPhone such as a closed ecosystem for apps, which are not problems with Android or WebOS.

All HP needs to do now is pair some good hardware with WebOS.

The Nasdaq is up almost 50% this year while the Dow is up almost 20%. Tech stocks are reporting stellar earnings with Intel, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google amongst others all beating estimates.

If the trend continues, 2009 will really be the year of the tech stock. And it isn’t even really that much of a bubble. Many tech stocks have non stellar P/Es. They are still higher than the S&P average but maybe justified considering the performance. INTC had a dismal last year which drove it’s trailing P/E to around 50. But now it seems to be back on track and has a forward P/E of only 13.5! Google has a forward P/E of about 24, Apple about 26. Amazon has the highest amongst the P/E ratios at 46 but as long as the recession continues, Amazon will probably continue to beat expectations as more shoppers turn to online shopping for more items.

Walmart.com, my new favorite destination for online shopping with free site to store shipping and prices that often beat Amazon, even after tax and the simplicity of returning to store, great customer service also can’t seem to affect the Amazon juggernaut much.

Windows 7  is selling like hot cakes and if Windows Mobile 7 is even a thousandth as successful as Windows 7, we should see Microsoft making some headway into the Mobile market. Really the best phones are either running Android or Windows Mobile and the current iPhone has nothing on them except the App Store. Expect both Android and WinMo to catch up quickly.

What can I say, if you can stomach the risk, wait for the excitement of  the current quarter die out and get some tech stock for yourself during holiday season.

Disclaimer: Parchayi and me own AAPL, INTC and GOOG stock.

Looks like I’m Posting a lot about Microsoft lately. Miscrosoft missed analyst estimates and revenues were down 17% and earnings down more than 1.2 billion$ (yes that is billion) as compared to last year.

Maybe Vista is to blame, maybe the bad economy though Intel’s results would indicate otherwise. Every few weeks I hear about something new from Google. I just got invited to Google Voice and recently discovered Google Wave. The only thing new and exciting I’ve heard from MS in the online front is Bing. I did make a post a few weeks back criticizing Microsoft but they did one good thing. Released the Win 7 beta for everyone to try and also establish that it really is not as bad as Vista.

In related news, Amazon posted bad results too. MSFT + AMZN both posting bad results is driving the markets down today but the Dow is still over 9000. A few more bad earnings and we might fall below 9000 once again. A few more good earning and we might stay above for a few months.

If you are looking at investing in one of Amazon or Microsoft after they fall today, my pick would be Amazon.

Intel and Google, both companies that I own stock in, both recently reporting. Intel reported spectacular results on Tuesday (as compared to analyst estimates and the previous quarter, still below last years results). Intel also upped it’s guidance. Positive news from Intel lifted the market up.

Google was the next to report and even though Google made it’s biggest profit ever, growth was the slowest ever. Google also had some fewer employees than last year. Also Google’s profit was more a result of shaving off expenses and not from increasing revenues. This was a disappointment that dragged Google stock slightly lower.

Apple (I own and the stock is finally approaching my average buying price), Microsoft (don’t own) report next week. Positive earnings are expected from Apple and the stock is hitting new 52 week highs. Micrsoft, not so much even though Windows 7 might cause an upgrade cycle.

In any case, some good some bad, overall the picture is neither good nor bad. Just so so. Personally my expectations are for tech stocks in general to be sideways or slowly go upwards. I have been wrong before and I probably wil be wrong again but I just don’t have very high expectations in the near future from the market overall. Next year might bring some better news?

I’m not an MS investor but I do use Windows everyday and I also have a really nice Windows Mobile phone.

As a developer, I figured, let’s see what it takes to make Windows Mobile touchscreen app. I quickly figured out that the free versions of Visual Studio (called Express editions) do not support mobile application development. What kind of brain dead decision is that? Who wants to buy something just so that they can support Windows mobile (not the most popular mobile OS anyway). The only worse offender in this regards is Apple, which gives you the development tools free but a Mac is required.

Anyway, VS.net professional is free for me because I work at a University so I download and install that from dreamcast. And to my surprise, unlike Apple, Blackberry, Palm and Nokia, Microsoft has no touch friendly development tools. Also it is nearly impossible to make use of hardware features of phones without relying on third party unsupported tools. Using the camera is painful. Accelerometer, forget about it. What is Microsoft thinking?

The new HTC, Samsung and other Windows Mobile touchscreens are all great devices but it we can’t easily develop for them, how is WinMo ever going to catch up in apps with Apple, Blackberry or anyone else?

The manufacturers of phones are also partly to blame for this. They make applications for their own devices that are sweet but don’t provide APIs for others to use. Maybe they are dragging Microsoft with them. Maybe MS can force their hands into making some kind of standard? Maybe MS can include some APIs with VS? Will it happen? Not a chance.

Recently I noticed that if you want to use the ribbon interface (which stinks, especially with people moving to widescreens and the inability of the riboom to be vertical) in your own application, you need a license from Microsoft? What the hell? Also the license seems to be evil, really evil.

I think that Visual Studio is the best IDE ever and was very happy when I first heard that the Express editions wil be free. But with such crappy practices from Microsoft, it might slowly lose its charm thanks to restrictions on developers. What will Microsoft do next? Not let people use VS to make apps that are similar to Microsoft Apps? Who will use VS then?

My work involves (mostly) web development using mostly non-Microsoft technologies and IE is my worst nightmare.  I just don’t understand how a company with the resources of Microsoft consistently makes the worst browser of the lot.  Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and the rest of the laundry list of browsers are all faster, more standards compliant and better to develop for than IE. For most good web developers, web applications are developed in two steps. First steps involve making a site that works in other browsers (if it works in one, it generally works in all the others). The second step involves adding hacks to make the site work in IE because that is the only browser that doesn’t behave well.

In the last few years, Microsoft has done many things (non development related) wrong too:

1. Released Vista before it was ready
2. Released Win7 (which is nice based on my first impression of an install in a virtual machine) faster giving the impression that skipping Vista is the wise thing to do
3. Corrupted ISO with the whole OOXML standard scandal. Also released badly broken OOO support in Office.

Every year someone or the other claims that it is the year of the Linux desktop. If Microsoft continues down this path of self destruction, maybe one day it will be as the Linuxes all improve each year in significant ways that are not all related to eye-candy.  The only software that Microsoft makes that don’t have worthy alternatives are the Office Suite and Exchange. And people make so many Windows apps because Windows is easy to develop for. I don’t understand why MS wants to throw a wrench in its own machinery. But hey, what do I know?

Something interesting for those of you who are still sticking to XP like me – Seven Remix XP

Anyway, the moral of the story – I’m not buying Microsoft stock anytime soon.